All posts tagged ‘Lego Club Jr. segregation’

Recently Lego has been getting a lot of flack about the new Lego Friends line that is geared just towards girls. GeekMom Kris recently wrote about Lego Friends, saying that many Lego enthusiasts were excited for Lego Friends because of the variety of brick colors in these sets. Still, even NPR weighed in on the controversy.

But a blog post by a UK Lego enthusiast, Impeus, was brought to my attention this morning that had me a bit troubled.

It was the story of a little girl in the UK who was a member of the Lego Club Jr. When you are a member of this club, you get a magazine four times a year. But when her new magazine arrived it wasn’t the regular magazine, but the new Lego Club Girls.

The Lego Club Girls magazine only had pictures of girls in it and heavily featured the new Lego Friends line, according the blog post at impeus.com. It also had no building plans as well as nothing about the popular Ninjago line that might be considered something that would only appeal to boys. Now this may have only happened in the UK, since one of our GeekDads got the regular magazine and not the special girls edition for his daughter. Since the original blog post was written, there has been an update.

Parents who asked what would happen to the photos their daughters sent in – would they appear in the main magazine, or the girls’ magazine? LEGO reps advised that photos of girls, regardless of the magazine they subscribe to, will appear in the girls’ magazine and not the regular one. This is similar to how LEGO currently put photos of children in the “Junior” age range (up to age 6) into LEGO Club Jr, and those of older kids in the standard LEGO Club magazine. This is what I wasn’t happy about – the erasure of girls from the boys’ experience of LEGO.

When I did a search for Lego Girls Club on the Lego website, nothing came up. I also contacted Lego for comment on the status of Lego Girls Club, but haven’t received a reply as of this writing.

As soon as a reply is received, the post will be updated to include it.